Comparing Augustine And Free Will

C.S. Lewis calls Christian belief a ‘shocking alternative’ to other views because humans have free will (Lewis 52). People might wonder why the ‘almighty’ Christian God unable to prevent humans from temptations. Free will is a gift to humans; God does not force people to do anything because He wants them to love Him ‘whole-heartedly’ (Matthew 22:37). This paper will explain why Lewis is right based on the possibilities to do evil and commit sin, and yet also be forgiven.

In Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will he explains that the human soul is predisposed to have a good will and that “it is a will by which we desire to live upright and honorable lives and to attain the highest wisdom” (Augustine 19, 1993). Augustine believes that in order to be free we must live according to our good will. To follow our good will we must live according to the four main virtues in life: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. He defines prudence as having “the knowledge of what is to be desired and what is to be avoided” (Augustine 20, 1993). Augustine establishes fortitude as “the disposition of the soul by which we have no fear of misfortune or of the loss of things that are not in our power” (Augustine 20,1993).

An omnibenevolent God created a man with the capacity to sin; as Augustine has addressed, the evil in man resides from his will. Augustine, however, does not address how evil stems also from the human nature of temptation that was a consequence of the original fall from Eden. Augustine touches on this theme when accounting for the origins of his sin, but he never fully declares it. “I loved to excuse my soul,” Augustine begins, “and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself” (62). Here, Augustine admits to denying his own human nature to sin, and blames it on something beyond his will, such as a result of creation. Bonner,

The play Antigone by Sophocles demonstrates throughout its story elements of Saint Augustine’s choice of the free will by involving choices of what she believes is morally right and not the law that is dictated by others. Antigone goes through her journey by making choices that are questionable but substantially true against the government by burying her brother because it is a cause that is greater than her and is what needs to be done.

St. Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will elaborates on the relationship between God, free will, and evil. During the very beginning of Book One, he asks the question, “isn’t God the cause of evil” (Cahn 357). From this question, it can be ascertained that he searches for a connection between God and evil (sins), which inferred in the writing to be connected though free will. He believes that God does not create evil, but rather that evil is simply the lack of good, since God is completely good and, therefore, cannot create evil. God not being the source of evil is then further elaborated through his explanation of a crime and how it is caused by inordinate desires and human abuse of good things (Cahn 360). By explaining

The question of whether humans are responsible for their actions or if they are under the influence of divine or supernatural power is one that has been debated over for centuries. There are three views that exist: the first is that there is only free will, the second view is that there is only fate, and the third view is that there is room and justification for both possibilities. The themes of fate and free will are very prominent in the book of Genesis and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In both, the fate of the characters is decided by a higher being, but the way in which they arrive at their destinies is determined by free will and the choices they make, which leads to the demise of the characters.

This I believe to be true because even if one is a moral person and has never stolen before, they have at least thought of what they would do with the item that they are looking at. An example given to me about this was in my psychology class where the professor gave an example of someone setting a briefcase full of money on a table while he leaves the room in front of hundreds of people and that everyone would at least contemplate what they would do with the money if they were to take it. This example I believe connects with the idea that people do bad or evil things even though they know it is the wrong thing to do. This can be connected to free will because one is given the free will to be able to think about and to commit evil acts that they know are wrong. This part of Book 2 would imply that we do have free will which helps Augustine’s argument that we are capable of free will, and is what causes the suffering in the world. This part of Book 2 can also be helpful because Augustine thought that evil does exist, and evil is just the absence of good. This is one of Augustine’s reasons for why you need God because God is the highest good. The only real contradiction to this argument that I can think of is that if we have the freedom of the will then how would one explain predestination? Freedom of the will and predestination need to be exclusive of each other because

Edwards, Jonathan. An Inquiry into the Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of Will: Which Is Supposed to Be Essential to Moral Agency,

Although free will has been defined in multiple, conflicting ways, the present approach analyzes it as a psychological capacity including self-control, choices, planning, and the ability to assess and initiate things independently. These capabilities are useful for making human social life and culture possible, but they depend on a limited resource and therefore often fall short of optimal levels. Religion may be helpful to individuals and society in part because it supports both the exercise of free will and the belief in it.

The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods. We willfully turn our souls away from God when we perform evil deeds. Even the punishment that God imposes on us for our evil is something that we brought on ourselves. Consequently, a first solution that Augustine offers to the problem of evil is that human will is the cause of evil and reason for divine punishment. A second and related solution is that the evil we willfully create within our souls is only a deprivation of goodness. Think of God’s goodness like a bright white light; the evil that we humans create is like an act of dimming that light, or shielding ourselves from it to create an area of darkness. It is not like we’ve created a competing light source of our own, such as a bright red light that we shine around to combat God’s bright white light. Accordingly, the evil that we create through our wills is the absence of good, and not a substantive evil in itself.

This paper examines St. Augustine’s view on evil. St. Augustine believed that God made a perfect world, but that God's creatures turned away from God of their own free will and that is how evil originated in the world. Augustine assumes that evil cannot be properly said to exist at all, he argues that the evil, together with that suffering which is created as punishment for sin, originates in the free nature of the will of all creatures. According to Augustine, God has allowed evil to exist in the world because it does not conflict with his righteousness. He did not create evil but is also not a victim of it. He simply allows it to exist.

In sum, God does not impact the freedom of the human free will due to his foreknowledge; He retains the will’s ability to sin for the order of the universe and the possibility of redemption from sins; He utilizes Original Sin as a necessary struggle for human to use their free will to turn back to HIm, so that they proves the worth of their souls. Through this close examination of On the Free Choice of the Will, we are able to trace Augustine’s opinions on how and why God made human free will as it is now. Nevertheless, Augustine considers not enough the undeserved suffering caused by others’ sins, which will only be addressed by further research on the

The grace of God is a necessary component of man being able to exercise his free will correctly and choose to do good. In On Grace and Free Will, Augustine says that the reason there are divine commands in scripture is so that man will not be ignorant of grace and free will. Therefore, God cannot be blamed when a man sins or deny the achievement of will when he chooses good, keeping the hope of reward for his good works alive. Augustine taught that when men do good it is because grace gives them the power to do

In his letter to the priest, Sixtus, Augustine claims that “…when [humans] suppose that free choice is taken away if they agree that a human being cannot have a good will without the help of God, they do not understand that they do not strengthen human choice…” he establishes one of the most debated concepts of the Reformation period: The human soul cannot save its self. This idea of Soteriology, expressed in his “Letter 194” presents only one side of the argument. On the other side of the spectrum of soteriological ideology was Pelagius’s argument that “to be just in God’s sight, a person must be pure in both body and heart.” Through the use of Augustine’s “Letter 194” as well as Pelagius’s “Letter to Demetrias” I will first summarize each author’s argument on how much of a role human free will can contribute to the immortal soul’s salvation. Then I will explain why both sides of the argument appealed to large groups, and why each view point remained debated all the way into the Reformation period.

     According to Augustine, “Human beings are endowed with a power that he calls the will.” He emphasizes the will to being the center of freedom. Unlike other philosophers, who are determinists, Augustine, who has a libertarian view, sees our will as free choice. So for whatever we may choose to do, we become solely responsible for our actions which are caused by external factors instead of internal ones.